Use it or lose it - The environmental case for property rights

Paper presented at “Freedom, Commerce and Peace, A regional Agenda”, Tbilisi, Georgia, 27 October 2006

“Ideally we would live and see wildlife and let it be, but it’s not the reality. If we continue with the attitude that wildlife cannot be touched and should just be looked at, then there’s no real future for it.”

– Ali Kaka, executive director of the East African Wildlife Society (England 2006)

When I was young they served cod in the Swedish school canteens. It was a cheap fish in almost unlimited supply. At least we thought so. The school children today are not as lucky. Today we have to go to the luxury restaurants in Sweden to get it. The cod stocks in the Baltic Sea have collapsed.

Since the Baltic Sea is a common, open to everybody, the individual fisherman has no incentive to be responsible and avoid over-fishing. Even if that would mean bigger supplies in the future, he would only benefit very marginally compared to all the others. As one fisherman put it recently:

“Right now my sole interest is in getting out and catching as much fish as possible. I have no interest in replenishing stocks, because every fish I leave behind will be caught by the next fisherman.” (Wheelan, 2002, p. 35)

In a classic article in Science 1968 Garrett Hardin popularized the term “the tragedy of commons” for this problem. The individual always benefits from fishing more, whereas everybody has to share the cost of depletion. Individual gain becomes collective pain. If the other fishermen catch as much fish as possible, without thinking about replenishing stocks, I will suffer tomorrow anyway, and my only interest is to catch the last fish before they do. If I limit my activities, the fish will be gone tomorrow anyway, and I will have lost not just the income of tomorrow, but also the one today. Hardin pointed out that it doesn’t help to rely on individual conscience and goodwill. If we did that, good people would always lose out against bad people.

Fishing is just one example. A tragedy of the commons appears everywhere where we have commons from which it is impossible to exclude people from the use of a particular resource. Hardin’s original example was about herders sharing a pasture. Since the cost of degradation is shared collectively, every individual herder wants to maximize his yield by increasing the size of their herd. The result is overgrazing and the loss of pasture.

1. A few words from Aristotle

The Greek philosopher Plato (470-399 B.C.) envisioned an authoritarian utopia, ruled by philosophers, where property was collective which would supposedly create unity and stability. His student, Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), had a less utopian and more empirical view of the world. He looked around and saw that there was private property in all types of societies, and draw the conclusion that there was a reason for this, in human nature. As Aristotle put it in Politics:

“how immeasurably greater is the pleasure, when a man feels a thing to be his own; for surely the love of self is a feeling implanted by nature and not given in vain” (1263a-b)

This interest would mean that people took responsibility and cared about their property for the long-term:

”Property should be in a certain sense common, but, as a general rule, private; for, when everyone has a distinct interest, men will n